As I mentioned in my last powerlifting post (A problem to avoid in periodizations),
listening to your own body may not be as straightforward as it sounds, even
after many years under the bar. Whether in systems that rely on autoregulation
or in those ones that prescribe a fixed number of sets and reps with a
predefined percentage of a 1RM (or of a more attainable “every day max” or “training
max”) as the weeks accumulate it is difficult not to get consistently closer to
the limit of what our body can adapt to.
Another way of looking at it is that we make
larger and larger withdrawals of our ability to recover, and in the end, sooner
or later, we will completely deplete it (or even go into the red and incur a “recovery
debt”). We would expect that to be the moment when progress stops, we start
failing more and more reps, find it harder and harder to go to the gym and even
start regressing, and finding each session that we end up moving less weight
(or the same weight for a lesser amount of reps) than the previous one.
Typically that dreaded “plateau” (or stagnation) is accompanied by a number of
symptoms outside the gym that can make its identification easier: feeling
overall tired most of the day, increased HRV (Heart Rate Variability),
persistent pain in some “trouble spots” (IT band, hip sockets, knees, elbows or
shoulders are the most typical ones) and even reduced sex drive (as you feel to
friggin’ tired to really bother about bangin’). But even if you manage to keep
the training stressors under control (and life, which as we all know has a
disturbing tendency to be a bitch, doesn’t add stressors of its own) and keep a
reasonable balance between how hard you push yourself in the gym and how well
you manage to recover, most likely if you keep the principle of progressive
overload (in its most essential form,
trying to keep each microcycle more challenging than the previous one by
judiciously or injudiciously increasing the load on the bar or the number of
reps or their density) there will be a time when you end up spending above your
income, or forcing yourself to go beyond your recovery capacity.
Now the consequences of that overdraw may be
more or less severe depending on how long you keep it and how deep “into the
red” you get. Injuries are a typical occurrence, as is temporary (or definitive)
abandonment of the sport altogether (something that happens as much as a 25% of
competitors in an Olympiad, that normally have to incur in such humungous recovery
deficits just to qualify that after competition, regardless of result, just let
it go completely). It stands to reason that the longer you can keep training
without depleting (or even better, positively building) your recovery capacity,
the further you will be able to progress and the healthier, fuller of energy
you will feel. That’s when the concept of “leaving one rep in the tank” comes
in. If your training methodology includes doing AMRAP (As Many Reps as
Possible) sets at a certain weight, or just accumulating sets across as long as you can, or even pyramiding to a
daily top set with the max weight you can handle that day, it makes an enormous
difference to take that set strictly to failure (even “one set to failure” is
many times subject to interpretation, as some people understand it to actually
start a rep that they can not complete, and have to drop or ask a spotter for
assistance, and other people understand it as completing the rep that feels so
limit as not to be able to start another one ,knowing with full certainty that
they won’t be able to complete it) and take it one or two reps short of that
failure. Those one or two reps would be the ones “left in the tank”.
It has to be noted that there are times to
really push it (the traditional balls to the wall attitude), as many times I’ve
experienced the exhilaration of believing I was in my last ropes, really close
to failure, and then eked out three or four reps more for new reps PRs that
felt extra sweet because of the sheer exhaustion and mental drainage that
accompanied them. Had I stopped leaving (apparently) one or two reps in the
tank, I wouldn’t have find what I was really capable of. What I’m saying here
is that you can not train that way for too long (I would dare to say that more
than 2-3 weeks is more than enough for most, as the cost to the CNS is just too
big) without burning out and loosing all desire to keep on pushing. I once read
Christian Thibaudeau describe those nerve-wracking sessions where you get as
close as possible to your limit (and then repeat, and repeat) as “training on
the nerve”, and I think the expression nicely reflects a salient feature of
that type of training: you constantly feel like you are in a torture rack, with
your nerves being pulled at, subject to a tension that threatens to snap them and
screaming in pain almost in every repetition, for hours on end, to the extent
that you actually feel a pang of fear in your gut every time you think what you
have planned for yourself for your next session.
There
are times, to be sure, when you just have to man up and keep pushing through
the pain, the uncertainty of the results, the apparent pointlessness and
futility of it all, as it just is what it takes to keep improving beyond
certain point. But, taking now a metaphor from Dan John, as there are times
when training is like waiting the bus (bus bench training), there need to be
times when it is like sitting in a park, feeling the tingle of the spring sun
in your skin while watching the people stroll leisurely by (park bench
training). So, next time you find yourself in a rough spot on your training,
dreading the next session and afflicted by a thousand minor aches and pains
(and by nagging doubts about the sanity of this whole lifting thing we do) you
may want to consider how long you have been training on the nerve, in bus bench
mode, and for how long do you intend to keep it until you lift the foot from
the pedal and coast a little bit. There is nothing wrong with that every now
and then…
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